blog

Image Credit - The Land The Indonesia-Australia trade agreement signed in March was another important deal for Australian agriculture, and follows a series of similar agreements the current government has forged with China, Japan and Korea. Australian agriculture produces far more than our domestic market can consume, and often needs a greater return on its produce than the domestic market ...
Continue reading

Image credit - The Land No matter whether you are conservative or progressive, I think we all have a sense that our world is changing too fast for comfort. It’s not just the climate, although the implications of a changing climate is of growing concern to Australians. All our systems - political, legal, economic, social - are being strained by growing populations, new technologies, and ...
Continue reading

Image Credit : The Land Australia has more land per person than almost any other country, yet about 90% of its population choose to live in just 0.2% of that space — mostly our coastal cities. We are nearly as urbanised as Japan (94%) and more urbanised than the United States (82%) and United Kingdom (83%). We in the bush would do well to remember how minor is our minority in the nation’s ...
Continue reading

Of all the various ways that humanity has devised for splitting itself into tribes, gender tribes are surely the most pointless. Men and women are undoubtedly capable of widely differing viewpoints, and are perfectly capable of exasperating each other, but we are literally nothing without each other. That's why it's been wonderfully encouraging to watch the rise of women in agriculture over the ...
Continue reading

Agriculture’s rapidly growing efficiency has been challenging for many of the regional centres that were built around a large agricultural workforce. Truckloads of possibilities for reversing the stagnation in the economies of many rural townships have been discussed over the decades, but the only sure recipes for growth seem to be either a large regional centre with the critical mass for ...
Continue reading

Imagine if Australia had stayed as it was in 1861, when nearly half the population could not read. We are today (almost) universally literate, thanks to the compulsory schooling introduced in the 1870s to overcome Australia’s literacy problems. But we now need more than the ability to read if we want to access education, government and financial services, and information in general. All these ...
Continue reading

Thanks to technology and our hyper-connected world, the marketing game is changing. Where a big marketing campaign once meant carpet-bombing advertisements across TV and newspapers, today one perfect product placement will carry a punch undreamed of before the internet amplified human affairs. That placement doesn’t have to be intentional, as Paspaley pearls discovered when Meghan, Duchess of ...
Continue reading

Anyone who has spent time in Sydney knows that it has become so congested that it is at best inefficient, at worst dysfunctional. Melbourne, long proud of its "world's most liveable city" claim, is starting to collapse under the weight of its fast-growing population.[1] Brisbane seems to be constantly pouring new concrete, yet is steadily becoming more clogged. The answer lies not merely in ...
Continue reading

Here’s a paradox. In that vast area of Australia outside major cities known – often dismissively – as “rural and regional areas”, the education sector is one of the biggest employers. And yet educational outcomes for the regions are well below those of cities. In the major cities, nearly a third of working-age people have a university degree. In the “inner regions”, the proportion of ...
Continue reading

So much hope invested in that weekend rain front: and much disappointment followed. Inevitably, though, this drought is going to be with us for a long time to come. Even when the rain deficit corrects itself, farmers will be carrying a drought-induced financial deficit on their books, perhaps for years. Since Alistair and I moved our farming business from Western Australia to NSW in 1997, the ...
Continue reading

Every successful enterprise has good management at its core. That includes Apple, which recently became the world’s first trillion-dollar company, and the family farm. Successful entrepreneurs are applauded for building their enterprises single-handedly, but inevitably, entrepreneurial success is built on a solid foundation of good management and the largely unsung people who make it possible. Are ...
Continue reading

Like many, I enjoy looking for great books, podcasts or stories about people who make a difference and truly contribute to others’ lives by sharing their learnings. Recently I listened to an ABC Radio National podcast called “Freedom and responsibility”, which was an interview with former Netflix chief talent officer Patty McCord. McCord’s views resonated with what I’ve aimed to create in ...
Continue reading

How are we going? Sometimes we need to sit back and take stock. That applies to our own lives and businesses, and to our agriculture sector as a whole. This is also easier said than done, as I am only too aware. There are always things that must be done before we take a break — and while we do those things, there goes the day/week/year. It has been five years since I had the privilege of ...
Continue reading

Drought is an inescapable part of farming we all face in Australia. Because its impact is so wide – affecting output, productivity and income – it is also probably one of the biggest challenge farmers and the service providers they use face. Bureau of Meteorology data shows we have just had the third-lowest April rainfall on record across southern Australia, with the lowest rainfall on record at ...
Continue reading

It’s been getting some bad press, but I love this digital age we have arrived at in the 21st Century. In common with 95% of Australia’s adult population, I carry with me a small slab of glass and metal encasing far more computing power than was used to put people on the moon. There is a full office in this little device: it allows me to communicate, read documents and respond to them, make ...
Continue reading

On the farm, we have just wrapped up a month of shearing. All went well, except that this year’s shearing went a week longer than usual with the same number of sheep. Our excellent contractor was, as usual, efficient and brought a good team of shearing pros. But for three weeks, he was down two shearers. There is a world shortage of shearers. This has hit especially hard in Australia, land of ...
Continue reading

We have been hearing a lot about “agtech”, a phrase that frames a lot of things, from sensors to drones to Big Data to smartphones. Technological advances are at the centre of the ambition expressed in a new National Farmers Federation/KPMG report, recently launched by the Prime Minister, to have Australian agriculture grow by 70 per cent to be a $100 billion industry by 2030. And another recent ...
Continue reading

Farming has become an immensely complicated and information-intense occupation, to the degree that some farmers have begun borrowing a centuries old strategy from corporations to support their business. For more than 500 years, corporations have outsourced some of their intelligence gathering and decision-making to boards of directors. Faced with an avalanche of information, bureaucracy and ...
Continue reading

As our elected representatives begin the Parliamentary year in Canberra – amidst some fairly unpleasant controversy – I’ve been thinking a lot about what leadership means. As Deputy Chair of the National Australia Day Council I’m lucky to meet some of Australia’s most inspiring community leaders. This extraordinary group of people – 32 finalists in all, from each State and Territory – have taught ...
Continue reading

Are we ready for alternative meat? By “we”, I mean those of us who run livestock for meat production. Perhaps within 10 years, certainly within 20, we are not going to be the only ones in the animal protein game. Plant-based products from companies like Beyond Meat are on the market, and are apparently quite tasty. Beyond Meat has a cast of athletes promoting the virtues of its vision for the ...
Continue reading

Resilience, tenacity and authenticity are in abundance in rural Australia. We also tend to be conservative, and don’t always throw ourselves readily into change. And why would we, when the weather, markets and the innumerable variables of farming dish out plenty of surprises? The farming life has enough unknowns without volunteering for more. But change is also the condition that produces ...
Continue reading

Farmers must be resilient to survive in the business. In any given year they deal with fires, floods, storms, drought, rain at the wrong time, pests, disease and market fluctuations. However, they also have to be innovative and not afraid to be different – two things Seftons is passionate about. The need for innovation and striving to be different were highlighted during the Farm Writers’ ...
Continue reading

Agriculture’s permanent war on invasive species sometimes feels like a version of modern warfare. Despite an immense and growing arsenal of weaponry, the adversary keeps coming, consuming more and more of our time, attention and capital.  The cost is astonishing. Australian agriculture loses between $3.5-$4.5 billion a year to weeds, in lost production and control costs. Invasive animals are ...
Continue reading

Among the many forms of tribalism rife in the world is one that is particularly dangerous to farmers — the myth of farmers versus the consumer. Consumers often don’t understand the complexities of farming, the myth goes, and they need to be better educated so that farmers can get on with business. Like all myths, this has an element of fact, but there is a much weightier fact on the other side ...
Continue reading

The agriculture industry is growing at a phenomenal rate. But can it really be Australia’s next $100 billion industry? According to the latest figures agriculture is now the largest contributor to national GDP (gross domestic product) growth and the fastest growing economic sector, rising 23 per cent in the past 12 months. It is no surprise that the main drivers of this growth are the ...
Continue reading

There is a disconnect between the statistical category “farm labour” and every farming enterprise’s desire to employ “good people”, because good people seldom want to be just farm labour. Good people want to be part of a good enterprise. A good enterprise supports the ambitions, ideals, or self-worth — preferably the trifecta — of those that work within it. 2015 Nuffield Scholar Reece Curwen, in ...
Continue reading

The road into town or the road out of town? Providing happiness for people living in the country will bring more people to rural and regional areas. We are in the middle of the greatest human migration the world has ever seen: the movement of people from rural to urban areas. By 2050, the United Nations estimates that around 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in urban environments. ...
Continue reading